


Finding the beat

by pushdragon



Series: Small Business 101 [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:28:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22629364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: Steve's wholesome take on domination has suddenly become the hottest thing in the business. He should be cashing in on his newfound celebrity, but instead he's distracted by the guy who works odd shifts in the club's bar, fresh out of prison and damaged in ways that don't show. (This new work is extra scenes from the same timeline as the original, Some Things You Do For Money.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Small Business 101 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619494
Comments: 40
Kudos: 203





	Finding the beat

**Author's Note:**

> So this new work is all extra scenes from the same timeline as the original. A few of them just didn't fit the development. Most of them are Bucky POV scenes that I sketched out to get into his head a little. I have to ask you to be patient with the tense switches and the incomplete nature of some of them. And I guess you all developed your own headcanon for Bucky, since you read 70,000 words without any POV from him. I hope this doesn't clash with it too much.
> 
> I want to dedicate this work to everyone who supported this story with comments, every one of which made such a difference to me and many of which left their mark on the story. I owe a special kind of thanks to the brave souls who chipped in multiple times on the first 3 chapters as they were going up, when I was really uncertain whether there was anything in here that would hold readers' interest, commenters like ginger_angel, gyrbug, razzleydazzley, Renea, moshiznik, killerwasp, zaogao, ispeakparseltongue and jackmichaela, and also to Bookbee for the rec. Thank you.

About mid-afternoon, Steve finishes up his measurements for the skirting boards and picks his drill up off the charger. He walks out the door purposefully, without comment, leaving Bucky, for the first time, alone. 

Immediately Bucky feels the pressure in the room – in himself, to be honest – ease. He looks up from the laptop screen for the first time in more than an hour, rolling his shoulders. 

Surveying the room, he feels like he's stepped into someone else's life. He can't be here, in this big, long vault of space with the pristine white walls and the faint smell of old wood and brick dust. Any second, someone's going to walk in here and tell him to fuck off. 

He's sitting up straight on the sofa, ready to scramble off it if told to. He makes himself lie back a little. There are feature lights, fat white spheres encircled by silver hoops. There's framed artwork on the wall. Every detail he can see was added to be beautiful, not because it was cheap, not because it could resist bodily fluids and stand up to constant industrial cleaning methods. There's something about the big, half-rotting old building that feels like a fortress, keeping the world at bay, the dilapidated top floors shielding this perfectly preserved sanctuary. 

The last twelve years have tweaked some things in Bucky's philosophy. The picket fence lifestyle he had been so contemptuous of in the full scorn of youth now seems like something to be dreamed about. The world's a fucking jungle, and there's nothing more valuable than a place you can feel safe. 

It comes on suddenly. He's so jealous of Steve's life he wants to smash something. 

He takes a breath. Steve's jacket is hanging on the stand by the door. The rich brown leather, when he puts it over his blue jeans, picks up the same colours as the interior design, the lighter beige of the leather sofa and its geometric patterned cushions in navy, like the whole place was an extension of him. Steve's pretty big, but despite their clash of wills on that day of the masterclass, he's never given Bucky a reason to be afraid of him. For a second, it all aligns, the apartment and Steve, one big, fiercely defended den in which Bucky has won himself a temporary right to sanctuary. 

Steve comes in, heading back to replace the drill, and Bucky realises he hasn't completed a single task during his absence. He busies himself in the screen. 

Steve just says "Tea?" and flips the kettle switch, like they were a team of two that it's his job to manage. 

"Sure. Thanks." 

There's a warmth in his chest all of a sudden and – oh hell – he's not sure how much of it is for the apartment anymore. And he tells himself, no. He's here to earn a wage. He knows what he thought, his first day at the club. He thought these deluded fools had to be pretty out of touch with life, to waste so much time pretending things they had no need to pretend. And he sure as hell is not getting sucked into that. It's the straight and fucking narrow for him, now and forever. 

**

Bucky watches him push his way through the last of the Saturday night crowd, returning smiles and greetings without breaking his stride. He doesn't see the wake of energetic commentary he leaves behind him. Even the club staff try to catch his eye casually as he goes past. 

Deference isn't the word for it, exactly. Bucky can see how Steve is well liked at the club, but he can also see how the little social groups within it – the smokers, the club dancers, the lifestylers – don't quite seem to include him. It's as if he walks through the place with a bubble of empty space around him, that no one is permitted inside of unless they're manacled and ready to beg. People don't invite him into things, and Bucky suspects that dynamic has been in play even before that Instagram post made him notorious.

Bucky can't tell if he's stridently independent, or just above it all.

He's not the sort of person Bucky's known before. The lessons Bucky learned are that physical strength makes all the difference, and when you take away the niceties of social rules, people are rarely kind, and can't afford to be. Steve breaks what Bucky thought the rules were every day: his lap is full of opportunities right now, because of that viral post. He should be maximising his advantages, but instead he's carefully delineating his values and measuring the gain against them. Bucky hasn't seen a lot of integrity in the last decade, not up close. 

The door swings shut behind him and Bucky goes back to emptying the dishwasher.

**

It's not the first time Steve has seen it, but it's the first time he remembers noticing. 

"That's the second time he's done it though."

Steve frowns. "What difference does that make?"

"Sure, leave it with me," Bucky assures him, after a pause. "I'll work something out."

Then he pushes the laptop shut and hefts the bag of laundry onto his shoulder, cutting off the conversation in a way that leaves Steve certain that, whatever Bucky works out, it won't be what Steve just told him to do, which is refund the client with the car trouble who missed last night's session.

Steve thinks of it while he has the apartment to himself – both the frustration of kicking around in his dom costume for an hour and waiting for the call, and the lightning-fast way Bucky defuses conflicts before they can start. They don't have a lot to disagree about, since it's Steve's business and he calls the shots. But now he's started thinking about it, he's seen it before. It's not fear, exactly. It's like he's weighing up every time, with the heightened sensitivity to aggression that he must have brought out of prison, can I force this? What are the risks if I try? Is there another way? What it looks like to Steve is just another level to what Bucky does for him every day: reading the terrain and strategizing the most advantageous way through it. 

In the quiet apartment, he lets the thought unravel, and the more he thinks about it, the more he wants to add it to the growing list of things he's glad that Bucky brings to his business. But it underlines what he already knows: that it would be an act of sheer stupidity to try and start anything between them. No matter how often his gut, catching that glint of insubordination, tells him that what Bucky needs more than anything is for someone to put him, gently and firmly, in his place and take the burden of self-control temporarily out of his hands, he reminds himself again that Bucky's smart enough to work out his own solutions. The last thing he needs, as he builds himself a semblance of a regular life, is for Steve to come blustering in with the only solution he knows. 

He has another one of those fleeting moments when he regrets that literally all the relationships he's had in the years since he lost Peggy have been … it's not that they were kinky, although they were, every one of them. It's that he'd let the power dynamic define them, every time, kept himself to the safe familiarity of rituals, and shied away from partners who tried to tempt him into other kinds of intimacy. For the last five years, stepping into character has never been more than a hard word away, for him, and he's liked it that way. Until now, when he can't help wondering if he could meet Bucky on another level, whether they might have had a chance if he could find a way to do it. 

He's glad to hear the front door unlock. Bucky greets him with a nod, flicks the kettle on, and goes to put away the laundry. The steamy clean smell of it infuses the room. A few minutes later, there's tea and a bowl of those coconut chilli peanuts he likes.

"You want to run your eye over that email to Flat Battery Martin before I send it?" Bucky says to him later, about three minutes before he has to get ready for his first client. "I told him no more free passes. He pays for the one he missed, and he gets 50% off the next session." 

He meets Steve's gaze directly, but Steve's pretty sure that, if he put his hand on Bucky's throat, he'd feel the nervous tension in him, the thrum of adrenalin readying him for a fight. It hurts, the idea that he could be the cause of that.

"No," he replies. "You can send it. If he doesn't call to complain, then we've got a new rule about cancellations." He pops another one of those peanuts in his mouth. "It's a good idea. Thanks."

Bucky nods without looking up. Then he toes his shoes off under the coffee table and burrows back into the corner of the sofa, getting comfortable.

** 

Bucky leans his head against the side of the bus shelter, blinking away the fine rain that drifts in under his hood, and wonders what he'd been thinking. 

He doesn't even know 100% which way Steve leans – from his client book, he'd guessed men, but maybe where he looks for pleasure is the opposite of how his work skews.

He wouldn't have made the offer if he hadn't been pretty sure Steve would take it up. He wonders what he misread. He didn't spend twelve years in a men's prison without learning to get a pretty good read on who wants to fuck him, and he's been getting pretty strong signals from Steve from the outset. He can't be a romantic, in his line of work. Although Bucky remembers how scrupulous he'd been about tipping him fairly, that first day they'd met, even when Bucky was swallowing down panic and ugly memories and making like having a drink with him was a new kind of punishment, and thinks no, it's not romance, not exactly. 

With the dark city sliding by his window, it occurs to him that he's got no idea how two men get together these days, even without the barrier of an employment contract between them. With the boys he'd known when he was young, it had been easy, almost no thought required at all beyond the simple question of attraction. When the music was in his head, he'd been happy to go home with just about anybody who could keep a beat. And after that – well, most prisoners were so quietly desperate for human contact and anything that took their minds someplace better that the bar was even lower. 

There's a lot more on the line now, but he can't tell if that's just for him. 

It doesn't matter, because he's going to put that possibility out of his mind. They're not on the same page, never could be. They barely speak the same language when it comes to sex. That's probably for the best. Keep the work relationship on the straight and narrow, uncomplicated. 

He handled it okay, he thinks. Kept the offer light and casual, didn't make a big deal of the rejection. Steve's a fair-minded guy. They can move on from this, and if he's lucky he can keep his job. He just has to be extra focused on Tuesday, and show Steve it's in the past for good.

**

"I trained as a paramedic," Steve tells him, "before I was in the police." 

"I can picture that," Bucky replies, freezing on the perfect image of Steve tightly rolling on a bandage, radioing ahead to a hospital with the same calm, easy tone he uses with his clients. "What happened there?"

Steve tells the story wearily, how his colleague got knocked unconscious by a patient in the grip of a meth rage and, instead of giving them better protection, they paired him with an even younger trainee. 

"I thought it was a symbolic thing," he says, explaining how he went home before his shift was finished and took two days of unapproved leave. "But there was something they'd never liked about me, from the start. When I went back to work, they had a letter of dismissal waiting for me."

That must have been a decade ago, Bucky thinks, or more. It explains some things he's noticed, about Steve and authority, about Steve's dogged relationship with his principles. 

**

"I've tried to help him," Steve said once. "It's too late. He's had decades of this way of thinking. The bitterness is ground right into his heart now." 

Bucky must have looked doubtful, since he went on. "You're a halfway whore, he told me once, when I tried to bring it up. Don't pretend to be a psychologist."

**

Bucky was about two strokes into the session before he realised how far over his head he'd gotten in.

Stuart was a spitfire mass of tension, shackled to the rack with his back to Bucky. The two red lines across his shoulders stood out starkly. Bucky had no reason to hate him especially, but he was a bully, and Bucky had bumped up against a lot of bullies in his life, and if Bucky had realised how much unfathomable anger he was carrying, he'd never have put a flogger in his hand. But now that he'd started, it was hard to stop. His heart was still beating from the thrill of those two strokes, of being on the right side of a power imbalance for once in his life. Foul names he hadn't heard since prison sprayed from his mouth like spittle. He saw something in himself that could flay Stuart down to the bone, and made himself not look away from it. 

Stuart's phone buzzed quietly, on top of the pile of clothes on the stool in the corner. It was a picture of a small child, smiling open-mouthed, not especially well shot.

He ran the flogger up the back of Stuart's bare leg, ignoring his protests.

"You think you're worth breaking a sweat over? Uh-uh. You can take it the way I want to give it, or you can tap out and go the fuck home."

But he was sweating under his clothes, and he wanted to smoke a pack of cigarettes right down to the cardboard box, like he hadn't done for months.

**

When he's sketching and his mind is clear, one of the shapes that Steve's doodles resolve into, these days, is tattoo sleeves. There's one with snowflakes. One with a bike winding around a strongly defined bicep. A phoenix wrapped around a forearm, tail curling around the wrist.

**

"You don't have any questions you wanna ask me before you do that?" Bucky asks.

"Nope. I already know everything I need to."

Bucky physically stops him ducking back down, hand under his chin. "I been in prison 12 years and I wasn't exactly a saint that whole time. You don't know what's in my system."

Steve curls his face down to nip gently at Bucky's fingertips, like his mouth's so keen it's got to have something in it while he waits. 

"I guess there's some things I don't know about you."

"You're damn right." Bucky had deleted those test results from his phone the moment they came in, closing that chapter of his past forever.

Steve glances up with those blue eyes, unhesitating. "But I do know you wouldn't let me do this if it was going to put me in danger."

"Jesus. You got a lot faith in the moral principles of a man who's a breath away from getting blown." 

Steve keeps on nipping, but there's a smile in it now. "You're holding me off right now, just to give me a lecture about safe sex. I think I called it pretty right, don't you?"

 _Fucking death wish,_ Bucky thinks, but can't say, because Steve's hot mouth has closed around his cock and sucked away his powers of speech completely. 

**

Bucky doesn't know shit about the science of nerves, but it makes him wonder, when Steve touches him like this. What were the nerves in his chest, in his arms, doing all those years, when he never noticed them at all? They spark up so effortlessly for Steve now, quicker and more electric each time. So much pleasure in his lungs there's no room for air. Is it even possible to grow new nerve cells?

**

He thumb-types it into a text message one time, sitting on his shitty foam mattress and listening to the wind rattle the thin plywood sheets over the windows of the defunct betting agency downstairs. 

_What happens next?_

It's vague enough to send, almost. But he deletes it and starts again. 

_When I'm fixed the way you want, what's the next mission after that?_

He's pretty sure Steve isn't the sort of guy to hurt him deliberately, or even casually. But there are things that his irrepressible optimism makes him blind to. Does Steve even know that about himself, how deeply he responds to the damage in people? If Bucky hadn't guessed it from their first encounter, he's certainly had every chance to confirm his theory watching the sort of clients who come and go in Steve's business. He wouldn't be here right now, if it weren't for that do-gooder streak that produced a job offer. 

_Would you even know what to do with someone who can stand on his own two feet?_

He remembers Steve's patience at the beginning, and the sense of purpose behind it. Sometimes Bucky had asked him dumb questions about the business, just to give him the satisfaction of answering, only for Bucky to end up getting taken in by the pleasure of listening to his steady, gentle reply without having to find a topic for conversation. The longer he stayed, the more clearly he saw how, much more than a practical necessity, those patient lessons in small business were an essential axis of Steve's character, something that made him feel useful, the fuel that drove the engine of his happiness. 

_DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE ASKING??_ he types, then deletes the lot and sighs.

Bucky's thought about this the way he thinks about everything, strategically, and he can't find any way to make this safe. He either does it, knowing what he knows about Steve, or he makes it go away. If it were just one thing, or the other. But his hesitation is not only about the risk of prising open the healthily scarred parts of him and finding out if he can still make himself vulnerable. The bit he knows Steve doesn't get is how, between this palpably unloved timber box, and the crowded theatrics of the club, and the perpetual new terrain of the event set-ups, the only place that feels like home is that big, high-ceilinged room where he dusts the window sills and wrangles Steve's diary into order. It could have been eerie there, after the human cram of prison, lonely even. And yet he can clearly remember the first moment he knew – not hoped, _knew_ – that he was going to make it. Right there on that sofa, with Steve's easy, calm commands coming through the door from the office, and the inbox down below twenty, and a fresh load of clean laundry waiting in the next room.

There have been days Bucky didn't think he had any more resilience left in him at all, and certainly not enough to hold him together while he sits on that sofa and watches it all slip through his fingers, as Steve loses that unexpected hunger for him, bit by bit, and turns it all on some sweet young sub who needs him in the very particular way that he needs to be needed.

But it's all or nothing. He's known that for a while, if he's honest. And if there's one thing he's learned it's that, even when he thinks he's at the end of his endurance, there's always more he can bear, and having any choice about it is an illusion in itself. 

And there's always a chance it might not be a disaster. 

_Candle globes for bathroom. Edison screw E12. x 4 Could do with mop refills while you're there._

This time he hits send.

**

One night Steve half-wakes, draped over Bucky, who's clamped around the pillow the way he often ends up when it's taken a good, deep dicking to send him off to sleep. As his palm glides down Bucky's back to his ass, not even sure what it is he wants, there's the unmistakeable encouragement of Bucky pushing back. But he can't hold back the thought that's been buzzing at the edges of his mind the last few days, that he's too muddle-headed to rationalise away now.

"You don't really like that," he hears himself mumble. 

Bucky's voice, though muffled by the pillow, is alert. "Who says I don’t?" 

"It reminds you of prison, being powerless." 

The silence makes him think he's pressed too hard and too directly on one of those tender topics they barely ever acknowledge, but then Bucky shifts his tight grip on the pillow into something looser and says, 

"You think I don't enjoy hearing you gasp and groan in my ear like you're literally a breath away from dying from how bad you need to get inside me? I bet you don't even know the sound you make when I squeeze down around you when you don't expect it." 

That thought sizzles through Steve's nerves, and what comes out of his mouth is probably a faint echo of that sound.

"See. And I wasn't – what I was in that place is what you call self-sufficient. And yeah, there was a price for that, especially in the beginning, but at the other end of that I found my place, and I stayed away from the grudges and the gangs and the accidents waiting to happen." 

He pulls back to give Bucky a sliver of space, aware by now of how he can open himself up in these random moments, if Steve remembers to shut up and give him the chance. 

"Sometimes I let men fuck me, if there was something I wanted bad enough out of them," Bucky goes on, after a while. "Most of the time I had a choice about it, and sometimes it was the other way around. It was a jungle every day. But I wasn't at the bottom of the food chain. Not in my second term anyway." He turns his head to get their mouths closer together and says, low, "If I didn't like the way you fuck me, you think I'd keep asking you to do it?" 

**

"You want to get dinner sometime?" 

Bucky probably looks pained at that, he certainly feels it. "What kind of dinner?" 

"I don't know. Anything. What do you like?" 

"Regular stuff. Burgers. Steak." 

"There's a place near the club we could go." 

Bucky's ribs are constricting already with the thought of it, an excruciating night of pretending to be a regular person who looks at a knife and only thinks of buttering his bread, who doesn't get wobbly at the sight of a carrot carved like a flower on the side of a dish of spring rolls. 

"You really want to pay someone else to put a steak on a grill for you?" he asks, a bit curt. "Why?" 

"Okay, forget I asked." 

"Okay." 

There's regret mixed in with the relief, because he can see Steve has no idea what just happened, or why. Bucky spends the rest of the afternoon trying to think of a way to explain that his idea of the perfect night out is sitting right here on Steve's sofa, surrounded by familiar terrain and the feeling of refuge he thought he'd outgrown with childhood. Maybe he can find a way, later, to plant the idea of baseball and beer and home-grilled steaks, the same as the day after he got sacked, which at the time was simultaneously the most wonderful and the most awkward afternoon he could remember.

He makes it one of those nights he stays on, and pulls together a snack of crackers, cheese and pickles while Steve is in with his first client. 

"You really want to go somewhere fancy?" he asks, watching Steve make them disappear. "Instead of here?" 

Steve frowns. "You work here." 

"We both do. It's not so bad. And you know what you're doing in the kitchen." 

"It's not exactly –"

"You could light a candle." 

Steve gives him a look like he doesn't know whether to laugh or not. 

Two nights later, Bucky scrabbles right to the back of the kitchen drawer and finds one to light.

**

Steve gives a frustrated sigh, "You know it's going to drive me crazy having to deal with those assholes on the regular."

"You want my opinion? It's gonna stay that way, as long as you keep cutting and running every time people disappoint you." Bucky shrugs off the look Steve gives him. "I'm going to take a shower and get in bed. You decide what you want to do about that."

Steve decides.

When he gets to the bedroom, Bucky's lying back reading a book. That opens up a lovely angle for Steve to tug the covers down and go in low, kissing his stomach, nuzzling into that narrow strip of warm, bare skin under the hem of his t-shirt that gets wider as Steve lavishes it with attention.

His focus shifts south. "I want to blow you."

"All right," Bucky says as if his ears are pricked for the hidden catch. "I’m not gonna say no."

"Slow." It comes alive in Steve's head then. "I want to fill myself up with the taste of you. Take all night with it. I want you to let me." 

"Jesus," Bucky breathes. "That sounds good to me." 

Steve nuzzles a bit to the right, along the firming line of Bucky's dick. "Sounds pretty damn good to me too."

Steve undresses him slowly, down to his bare skin, leaving soft kisses everywhere he goes. He crawls down between Bucky's legs, slides his hands up the mattress, beneath Bucky's thighs, wedging them under his body so he can just support himself on his elbows, on a low angle with his face a couple of inches away from Bucky's dick, and he holds that for a while watching Bucky spread out for him, getting plumped up on nothing but anticipation. Bucky makes an impatient noise. He may never be completely easy, opening himself up like this, but that just provides all the more reason to find creative ways of taking his mind off it. 

The kisses he presses into the base of Bucky's shaft would be sweet, except for how he's using the pressure of it and the stubble over his top lip to work him hard. It hasn't got old yet, this end of it, the satisfaction of feeling under his mouth or his hand the evidence of what he can do to Bucky. Before long, his hips are moving, pressing up in search of more, so Steve eases back a bit, noses gently against Bucky's balls where the cedarwood shower gel is starting to give way to the more tempting human musk beneath.

Before long, Bucky's heel starts to dig into his ribs, encouraging him to get a move on. But all he wants to do is keep going with these intoxicating light caresses, kissing at Bucky's dick and feeling the responsive jump of it.

"Hey buddy," Bucky says, a bit slurred. "If you need me to take care of this myself, you be sure to let me know."

Steve gives him a slow lick with the flat of his tongue, right to the tip. "I think I got this under control for now."

Sometimes he can't help it, thinking of all those years Bucky missed out on letting someone take care of him this way. He loves Bucky's body more and more as he gets to know it, the capability of him, the tightly held discipline, the perpetual vigilance that he's slowly learning how to turn down. It's a crime that strikes right into Steve's heart, that Bucky's beautiful body didn't spend the whole of his twenties getting sexed up in a soft bed by someone devoted to his pleasure.

Bucky's starting to leak at the tip now, and Steve licks into that hungrily, laps at the hard muscle beneath until it's clean. That sort of quiet on Bucky means he's biting it all back, barely letting himself breathe for how bad he wants to moan. Steve sucks the head of his dick into his mouth and nurses it softly, with a few greedy moans all of his own, until Bucky breaks and starts to say his name, dry-mouthed and just a little bit broken. He takes it a bit deeper, pitting Bucky's hot length against his gag reflex until it's soaking wet between them. 

"Fuck," he groans when he pulls off for breath. "I want to do this slow, Buck."

The formless growl in Bucky's throat says he's not on the same page about pacing. He kicks his heel into Steve's rib again, but his hands stay twisted around the bedhead, white-knuckled. 

"All right," he says, and hears Bucky swallow. "I'm gonna do it. But I want you to pick five other places for me to put my mouth on you first." 

Bucky makes a hissing noise like that's totally out of line, like Steve has finally pushed him too far. But it takes just a few deep breaths before he's saying in a rush, 

"I've kind of got a thing for my belly button."

If he'd guessed that, it's nothing compared to the thrill of being asked. Steve licks into that shallow indentation patiently, teasing out all its textures, digging his tongue in hungrily, until Bucky is trembling for him. 

"My neck," Bucky breathes out, and that's something Steve loves to do as often as Bucky will let him, sucking gently over his pulse point, kissing up his windpipe until his lips are inflamed from the stubble. He nips his way down the tendon, pinching the flesh in his teeth and pulling, close enough to feel how Bucky's whole system responds to it, pulse hurtling under his mouth. Going roughly about it, relishing the fact that Bucky's got enough dark growth to keep the aftermath covered up if he wants to, he keeps at it for a light-headed long time, teasing out the responses beneath him, until Bucky pushes him back and slips two fingers into his mouth. 

This time Steve's the one making noises because, yes, the salty curl of Bucky's fingertips against his tongue does unholy things to his system. He sucks noisily, sighing around his mouthful, then takes them one by one, cinching his lips lewdly around the last knuckle, kissing their wet tips. 

"You had enough yet?" he asks, 

"Yes. No. My chest is kind of – god –" 

He's breathing hoarsely now, as Steve sucks his nipples hard and rolls them mercilessly in his fingers until Bucky's pushing his shoulders into the mattress, trying to get away from the too-muchness of it. Once he's got him to that point, the obvious next steps is to hold him down and torture him with little kitten-licks over the sensitive, swollen flesh until he's giving up deep, inarticulate groans. 

There's one choice to go, but Steve's too distracted by the hot, roused smell of his body to let him make it. He shifts round to the side and kisses his armpit, and Christ he smells good there, so good that Steve wants to open his mouth and eat him alive. Bucky says, _ah,_ and squirms. Steve keeps on doing it, stroking the pad of one finger up Bucky's dick to keep it throbbing for him. He gets a full body shudder Bucky abruptly hits his limit and says, "Steve. Enough."

Steve takes one more kiss from his panting and unprotesting mouth, then crawls down and gets to work. He thinks about it more than he should, how well he knows what Bucky needs to get off now. On the treadmill, in the supermarket, when he's watching Bucky's casual competence stocking the bar. A brisk, consistent rhythm, a firm stroke around the base, and a bit of verbal appreciation never goes astray. It's a good day. Bucky's making soft little grunts of pleasure that Steve can navigate by to give and withhold, keeping him on edge a few more times before he takes a firm grip on Bucky's hips and sucks him over. 

The taste of it is still strong in his mouth when he takes himself in hand roughly and works a blinding hard orgasm out.

"One thing I never could figure out," Bucky says later, when they're curled up together, avoiding the wet corner Steve left behind. "You got the patience to give me all that, and hardly lay a hand on yourself for while you're doing it. You check in every five minutes to make sure I like what you're doing." His fingers start playing lightly in Steve's hair, as if to soften what's coming. "But put you on the other side of a meeting table, and all you got to say is no."

"Well," says Steve, shamelessly pressing up into Bucky's touch, "I'm not gonna pretend I don't get anything out of making you happy. It's what makes me tick. Think of it like a pleasure feedback loop. It's really simple, Buck. Tony's happiness doesn't motivate me the way yours does. And that's not gonna change."

Bucky laughs. "When you put it like that, I guess I don't want it to."

**

Chloe, the PR adviser with the rape fantasy, causes him two weeks of grief, because he can't find anyone he trusts to give her what she wants, but can't bring himself to abandon her to the risk of rank amateurs or bonafide psychopaths on hook-up sites either. After some exhausting conversations with Shuri about documented consent, three separate sessions with Nat testing out how his weight advantage works on a resistant partner, and planning sessions that spiral into literally days, and against all his better instincts, he agrees to it. 

To his immense relief, she taps out in under three minutes, trembling, and, he can only hope, content to keep that particular fantasy in the safe realms of her imagination. He gives her a vigorous caning session strapped to the rack, instead, which at least he can charge her for, and spends the rest of the evening watching half of the Jon Hamm season of 30 Rock with his head in Bucky's lap.

**

It's hard enough – a lot harder than he thought it would be - standing in the bedroom with those cuffs on. They might have looked sleek, but the weight of them, and the slight strain in the angle of his shoulders and elbows, it takes him right back to places he's got no reason to ever want to think about again.

It's hard enough, but then he's on the bed, his knees either side of Steve's legs, and Steve's stroking his face soft like he wants to open him right up and look inside. And if his pulse rate shoots up, it's not the good sort of response, it's almost all panic.

"Hey," Steve's telling him, brushing back his hair. "There's nothing to fight. Just let it happen, let me give you what you need. You're lovely like this." 

"You're so full of shit," Bucky says, totally missing the tension-busting teasing he'd aimed for. 

He takes a half-breath in and looks at the wall behind Steve's head and tells himself it's all in his mind – he just has to get into this. Steve's not going to hurt him, he knows that, except he can feel in every soft touch how the thing he wants most is to strip all Bucky's defences back to nothing, and he's not sure he can stand that, even if it's another thing that's all in his mind. Fuck it, people pay a fortune to have Steve do what Bucky's getting for free, and they're not deluded, he knows that now, and not all of them are even damaged, but they leave every session looking like they're walking on clouds and Bucky has put up with so much more than most of them, for a pretty long time, he should be able to fucking handle this.

"Just give me a chance," Steve says, and kisses him and, just for a second there's something he could get into, Steve's tongue hot in his mouth while he holds Bucky firmly in place, but there's that instinct in him, deep as blood, that tells him you can never walk it back. Once you're shown that you're one of the weak ones, that knowledge stays in men's minds forever, and they turn into stalking tigers waiting for the moment they can jump you.

"This is messed up."

Bucky just looks up at the ceiling blankly because he has never felt so jumbled up, between wanting to please Steve and desperately wanting to chase that faint trail of arousal, while every instinct in him tells him to lash out and defend himself, and he knows what he's capable of if he's pushed too far, how quick it happens. Why isn't it getting better? He trusts Steve. Hell, people who barely know Steve, people who've got less reason to trust him than Bucky does, manage to let go of their fear. Even if he's pretty sure he can't give Steve the level of intimacy he gets from clients who've had more chance to get in touch with their emotions than life ever gave to Bucky, why the fuck can't his body let him sit still and let it happen?

"Look this isn't a scene, not really. I hear you say no, I hear you say stop, then we stop."

He wants … the feeling from the second day he worked here, when he'd sat on Steve's couch, the leather worn with the shape of him, his hand all over the walls, enveloped in this place that had Steve stamped on every square foot of it, the furniture in shades of brown and blue that echoed his clothes. He somehow imagined there's a place he could get to that would feel like that. But the metal on his wrists, the unforgiving weight of it, the humiliation from a decade ago is still there, almost as strong as when it was happening. He's back in that cell, every emotion in him numb except the fear, and Steve is kissing his neck, wanting him to be open, needing that from him, if Bucky is going to keep hold of him. 

"You're safe. Bucky." Steve is saying, over and over, right up inside Bucky's space with his mouth on Bucky's neck. "It's okay."

But every instinct in him is blaring a warning that it's not okay, he's going to get hurt. He wants to close up tight as a shell and never open again. The anger switches and flows, from himself, to his past, to Steve who keeps fucking pushing him. 

"No. I can't do this. Take them off."

But even with the cuffs unlatched, the breaths won't come. He rolls off the bed and strides over to the sink. With each gulp of water the panic seeps out of him. The anger, though, that's harder to shift.

**

A lot of things are different the second time he tries it. 

One of them is that he lives here now. He can look at the bedside table and see his book there, with the brochure for Steve's masterclass series folded up for a placeholder. He knows which pillow smells of coconut from Steve's hair product, and which ones smells like him. He's spent a lot of mornings watching the ceiling light become distinct against the white paint, while he puts his hands behind his head and lies there soaking in the peace and quiet, and waits for Steve to get back from the gym.

The worst part is behind him, he realises, once the latch of the cuffs has closed. That was the moment the memories came closest to swamping him. He'd felt nauseous with it, for a few moments. But then the beats were vibrating up through the soles of his shoes, and Steve was right behind him, doing one of those acrobatic feats he'd schooled himself to do, where he kissed Bucky's shoulder and stroked his arm and made his whole body a shield without quite crowding him. 

Bucky's done a lot of work on making his hair-trigger defensive instincts relax around Steve, to force his body to stop registering the muscle-packed mass of him as a threat. It's not easy, but Steve's so beautiful to look at, some days all Bucky can think about is lying back in his arms – and fuck it, he's going to have that. He had it last night. No one's going to stop him having it whenever he wants. 

"This all right?"

"So far. Don't stop now."

There's another hairy moment when Steve comes back from the office with that box, but this is Steve, he says to himself. This is Steve who he trusts like no one he's met before. They were at breakfast half an hour ago. Steve had peppermint tea for about eighteen times the cost of the ones he drinks here, Bucky had calculated, including the electricity of boiling the kettle. 

For a moment, Steve reads his body and looks at him like he's going to call time, and Bucky thinks _don't you fucking stop now._

Instead, Steve starts talking.

Bucky listens, and what he hears is how Steve found his way back from a lonely place by finding his dominant side. A lot of things make sense when he hears that. Of course, he kind of sensed it from the beginning, how Steve walked around in a bubble that only opened up when he was working, but now the roots of that disconnection are confirmed. Steve's still not fully attached to the people around him, like friendship is a plank that's wobbled under his tread too many times before and he can't quite make himself put his weight on it. Bucky has been looking for small ways to bridge that gap. 

"It's the most honest part of me, Buck," Steve tells him. "I want to be able to share that with you, any way you'll let me."

And that's such a strange thing, to have someone need him, not his hands, not his labour, but him. It makes him want to not let Steve down. That thread that takes him right back to the beginning, when not letting Steve down had been a matter of holding a ladder steady or working a straight line with the chop saw. Somehow it makes his grasp on himself firmer, thinking of this as a project he's completing for Steve, and not work he's doing on the warped and unreliable materials of himself. 

The ink helps, the ink and Steve's steady hand putting it on his skin. The ink keeps him focused on now, where he needs to be. It works its magic on him, the tiny dabs of contact, and Steve bent over him as intent and serious as when he's sketching. Before long, it starts to work him up, the cool, damp line of it curling along intimate parts of him that haven't been touched by a lover's hand for years. 

The question bursts out of him the moment he puts together the familiar beats. 

"You got a playlist for this?" 

He knows the answer before he hears it. The songs aren't all off the meagre selection on Bucky's phone. Some of them came from someone he goes clubbing with, Val maybe. For an instant it's too much, and all he can do is laugh. He's so fucking damaged, and he never expected someone like Steve would take that kind of care with all his defects. If he knew he was going to get better, it was still work he'd planned hard to be able do all by himself. 

"I put some time into thinking about what would make you comfortable," Steve tells him in the understatement of the fucking year. "How’m I doing so far?"

Bucky laughs out another flip reply, and his shoulders go limp for the first time since the cuffs went on, because it's okay. He's got this.

Maybe Steve senses something, because a few moments later he's kissing him, the way Steve likes, deep and slow with his hand in Bucky's hair holding him right where he wants him, and Bucky responds to that with a full-body shiver, because nothing gets him like that, Steve's constantly pulled strength, always careful even when Bucky has literally given him permission to do anything he wants. 

"I'm not going to make it easy." Steve tells him later, stroking his dick at last with a light touch that could be the end of him. "I'm going to make you work for it."

And Jesus that's tapping into something Bucky didn't know he had in him, an urgent need to please Steve, live up to his expectations. 

"I want you to succeed." Steve keeps murmuring sweet, meaningless things like that. "Make as much noise as you want. I like hearing you ask for it."

Yeah, Bucky can make himself what Steve wants, gently receptive and getting off on it, on Steve's hand strong around his hip and Steve's unyielding mouth taking what he wants. 

"Don't stop," he husks out between strokes. 

"Can you say please for me?" Steve asks, his voice going tight. "Don't even care if you mean it. Just want to hear you say the word."

Bucky can't. It's too demeaning – doesn't Steve know how hard a man has to hang onto his pride when it's about the only thing he has left with a decade on the horizon? But it's just a word, and the strain in Steve's voice is revealing just how bad he wants to hear it. Steve, who's waited so patiently for him to get to this place, waited for Bucky with all his fucking issues when he could have had a dozen eager subs who'd have given him none of the trouble. And it's just a word. He says it.

He's not prepared for the power of it. Steve's face. His goddamn stupid face that shows all his emotions like he's invincible, like he's got nothing to be ashamed of, like nothing he puts out into the world is going to come back and defeat him. Steve turns that face on him and it's lit up like Bucky just created the universe for him with one fucking word.

So he says it again, the next time Steve asks him to. He says it for Steve's ridiculous fucking face, and his dumb fucking heart behind it that's been coddled by life to expect good things to happen and trust to be returned. He can say it all the times Steve wants to hear, if it makes him look like that. He can say it and none of the low-lifes he spent twelve years living with can do a goddamn thing to stop him. 

There's a moment, later, after Steve pulls him back from the edge the second time, when he thinks he gets there, to that dreamy place they all go on about. His hands are clasped behind his back, no longer straining the cuffs, and it's like floating, this feeling, the total surrendering of will, the putting his pleasure completely in Steve's hands. 

"Can you wait?" Steve asks, soft. "I want to keep you like this all day."

And Bucky wants to push himself again, but it's not a magic, the place they've gotten to today. It could turn bad, if he pushes too far, and he might not be able to find his way back here. 

"Tell me you're going to fuck me," he says from deep down inside himself. "Tell me that's next."

And Jesus, Steven Grant Rogers and his stupid face, he is never going to get tired of it.

It's such a perfect, simple connection after all the teasing, the hard length of Steve inside him, that he can't make himself go easy. He gets a couple of minutes of wrecking himself savagely on Steve's cock before there's the heat and the stuttering rhythm of Steve coming inside him, and he's so close himself he could almost cry, but then Steve's hot mouth is on him, knowing exactly what he needs, and - he - is - fucking - _out_.

Afterwards, a long while afterwards when the first inkling of rational thought starts to filter back in, half of him feels like he's climbed a mountain, high enough to look back and see the vast and perilous ground he's covered. But there's another part of him that can only think, baffled, _why was that so hard?_


End file.
